Are you itching to tell a fantastic tale about aliens from the distant stars?
Great!
Stories featuring aliens have as vast of possibilities as the immenseness of space.
But how will our story handle our alien visitors' interactions with humanity?
Should we have our space faring visitors from beyond the stars come in peace and open a
dialog with humankind?
The prospects of peaceful coexistence with alien life is a near endless well of potential
drama and an opportunity to explore deep themes about the nature of life and existence.
Which is why it's boring!
Instead, let's just have our outer space visitors shoot at humanity with ray guns.
That's much more exciting and won't make our audience uncomfortable with unpleasant existential
questions.
So let's get ready to tell an exciting tale of alien invasion.
Just follow my tips and you too can bring humankind to its knees at the heels, or alien
equivalent, of our extra-terrestrial overlords.
Let's get started!
Now some may make the mistake of over thinking the alien's motivations for invading.
This is not as difficult as it sounds.
We could just have the aliens invade to steal Earth's natural resources like iron, water,
or gold.
Never mind that all of these things can be found in abundance in space and those don't
have a hostile civilization with nuclear weapons defending them.
Nor should the aliens consider trading some of their technology for natural resources,
letting the humans do the work for them without wasting time and energy fighting a war that
would likely leave the Earth completely irradiated rendering any resources gains worthless.
Just mention in a throwaway line about how they are after Earth's resources and move
on.
I'm sure the audience won't question it at all.
But why stop there?
If we want to make the aliens extra evil, we could have them conquer earth so they can
devour us.
Yes.
For some reason the aliens want to eat us in spite of deadly biochemical barriers.
Just make sure they don't discover the wide array domesticated species that have far more
meat on them and that don't have assault rifles.
There are many other motivations we can give them as well from using humans as host for
their offspring to attacking earth for spamming out crappy youtube videos.
But if we can't think of anything then don't worry!
We can just have the aliens invade for no reason at all and just hint that they have
some greater motive.
Now we have the alien's mandibles salivating at the prospect of conquering Earth.
Time for the invasion to begin.
Now being a species powerful enough to bridge the vastness of space would obliviously mean
that they are highly intelligent and thus would know the value of gathering key intel
on human culture, assessing Earth's international political situation, and analyzing each nation's
relative military strength as well as sending a vanguard to infiltrate major population
centers and gather real time ground intelligence to assist the main invasion force.
No doubt the aliens could even use diplomacy to play nation states against one another
just like historic colonial powers.
However, these tactics have two critical weakness.
The first is that they require the author to actually know something about countries
other than America.
The other is that the audience will fall asleep at the words 'international politics' so make
sure the aliens just rush in and start zapping major cities right off without any kind of
strategically sound plan.
Now given the advanced state of alien technology, one would assume that they would know to first
destroy key military targets, critical logistical infrastructure, and essential communication
hubs.
This is completely wrong!
Instead the aliens should spend all of their time destroying historic monuments.
Naturally our military should be completely ineffective at stopping the alien menace.
Have our weapons prove useless against the alien's war machines.
Just be sure the army doesn't use any actual tactics and just stands there shooting ineffectively
while being cut down by death rays.
After a minor skirmish, the armed forces of humanity should instantly throw in the towel
without changing tactics.
Instead, they should escalate to using nuclear weapons, which of course, will also prove
useless against the aliens' plot shields.
Whoops.
I mean deflector shields.
After the aliens easily defeat our strangely incompetent military forces, humanity will
be on the verge of extinction.
But don't give up hope yet!
We need to give our aliens a weakness!
The aliens can be easily defeated by mankind's most powerful weapon.
The love triangle!
Not even the most powerful alien technology can save a story from being derailed by a
love triangle!
Little did the aliens know that the power of love can overcome all obstacles... well
unless the story is targeted at a male demographic in which case the aliens will succumb to the
power of bullets.
Just never mention why all of humanity's armed forces prove ineffective at stopping the aliens
while the protagonist manages to destroy legions of alien foes by himself with a crowbar.
If one can't think of a weakness then don't worry about writing yourself into a corner.
Alien invasion stories are so easy to resolve that they sometimes resolve themselves, like
having the advanced and highly 'intelligent' aliens forget their inoculations and not invest
into anti-virus software.
Regardless the humans need to win the day in the end.
It is very important that the aliens be completely defeated by a species so stupid they can't
even make it to mars.